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Monday, August 4, 2008

Monday, August 4, 2008

You know how it is for some of these grocery-store bakery decorators: some days they're just not reaching their full cake-wrecking potential. On those days they give their airbrush, questionable design choices, and horrific color palettes a rest, and instead produce a simpler, quieter kind of wreck. A wreck that says, with world-weary disdain, "Hey, I make $7 an hour. Deal with it."

I guess the cracked icing counts as decoration.

While I'm sure Tim appreciated the baby-pink roses for his big 4-0, I get the feeling that someone really enjoyed skewering the cake with those candles, dartboard style.

This cake is Cake Wrecks approved! Way to knock yourselves out, there, decorators!(They get bonus points for the random capitalization.)

I have to say that I do find some of these cakes amusing and other horrifying.

However, I truly hope that you don't feel that all grocery store decorators decorate in such a manner. There are just as many talented people that work at a supermarket as there are untalented. Just saying.

Hey hey hey! I am a "grocery store decorator" and I can do something BESIDES airbrush! And I do have good color tastes, except when customers come at me with gawd awful color swatches and combinations.... Oy. Teal, rose and antique gold anyone? Oh, and I should have submitted the Baby Sonogram shower cake I had to do last week myself, especially since the customer wanted gel icing "bubbles so it would look like he's floating" around the EM picture. *headdesk*

Seriously, don't discount all of us Grocery decorators. Some of us are pretty darn good. I've been recruited by more than one of the local specialty bakeries, but they can't match my salary, union benefits, vacation/pto time and such.

Brown flecks are caused by chocolate cake + stiff white icing (usually buttercream)+ a decorator who doesn't have the time or inclination to solve the problem by taking extra care.

For the rest...sometimes customers actually ask for cakes just like these. "Aw, no, nothing fancy, just write "Welcome home Jack" on it." They don't even want a colored border or sprinkles. Other times, if they don't ask, the cake decorator doesn't add any extra flourishes, for fear that "Laverne" could be a man, so wouldn't like pink roses, or roses at all. Other times, men actually want a cake full of roses- they say that they want the extra icing.

And, in my opinion every bakery, grocery store or otherwise, should have a dictionary.

well, at least the lackluster "congratulations graduates" cake was spell-checked. that could have gone very south. either/both of those words has/ have caused problems for bone-headed decorators in the past! maybe it would've been more entertaining to let an idiot decorator inscribe the cake... instead of an english major.

And I worry if my cakes look good enough on a daily basis....! Ha ha! This blog makes me feel like freakin' Picasso!!!! Or even.......DaVinci!!!When one of my cakes appears on here, I will know it's time to hang it up.....

I think these are an example of the baker's day off. I know at the bakery my roommate works at if the baker is off that day people just write things on pre-decorated cakes and send them out. He's made a few of these gems himself. I'm shocked people don't complain but apparently they're happy to pay for anything with icing on it.

The plain white cakes might also be 'ringers' of sorts. I recall our grocery in California sold blank cakes and you got a tiny tube of writing frosting free. I don't recall plain white, usually there were a trio of roses and random squiggles in opposing corners, done with whatever color of frosting they had on hand. Blue roses. Teal roses. Green Roses. whatever.

Well as a cake decorator, I actually can see how some of this happens. Basically, everyone in the bakery/store is told they have to know how to write on a cake. MANY times people come into the store last minute, grab a random cake out of the case (hense the pink roses on that one, probably the only one with white icing or yellow cake or whatnot, it happens), then ask a random employee to write on it. Cake decorators aren't there 24/7 and many stores are open that long. I personally leave either at 7am, or 2pm. So you get the mentally challenged minimum wage clerks to write on the cake for you, instead.

What's sad though, is when as a cake decorator you start getting requested because the other two decorators suck in comparison, and they've been at it for decades.

My fiance worked for several months in a grocery store bakery making $7/hr. They gave him next to no training on cake decorating - he was the cookie/donut/bagel prep guy, not the cake decorator guy, after all. Even so, he was expected to be able to write stuff on cakes - not just literately, but all nice and pretty. The thing is, no matter how nice one's handwriting may be (and my fiance has pretty nice guy-writing), handwriting and cake writing are not equal.

He hated that job. Especially when he got customers like the lady who wanted a cake for her daughter, didn't specify a color for the writing, and got irritated when he wrote in red because her daughter hates red. Because he's psychic, you know. And merely covering up the writing with a preferred color wouldn't cut it. She wanted the writing scraped off and redone. Then she was mad when it looked horrid and wouldn't purchase the cake. He and a buddy paid for it and took it home (it was an ice cream cake and pretty tasty).

Not that there's an excuse for a lot of the cakes on this site, but yeah, if you go to a grocery store bakery, especially if the main decorator isn't on duty... You are taking a big risk assuming the guy behind the counter has much (if any) skill with a piping bag.

I work in a grocery store bakery and many of my friends are amazed at the off the wall orders I get on a regular basis. weird color combinations, designs that are scifi, at best, and even spellings that boggle the mind. They seem to want some of these things to be a practical joke on the birthday person and it ends up looking like some of the pics on this blog. We try to warn them that it's not going to look good, but they have it in they're mind that that is what they want and nothing will change their minds. Then we have to listen to them complain and try to get the cake for free, cause " this isn't what I ordered". When in fact it's exactly what they ordered.

I used to work as the closing cashier (3pm-12am) for a large chain grocery store. I can not tell you how many people would come in after all the bakers and deli clerks went home and not just asked, but pleaded to have someone write/draw on the cake. Being the only one that late who even knew how to use a piping bag, I'm ashamed to say I have given people cakes that look like this! And the thing is, I used to tell them I have terrible handwriting and if they really wanted me to write on the cakes, it would NOT be pretty! They didn't care! Some people were so happy I agreed to write on their cakes they would try to tip me...even though the resulting cakes looked very much like the ones above. What can I say? Some customers are weird like that.

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What's a Wreck?

A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate - you name it. A Wreck is not necessarily a poorly-made cake; it's simply one I find funny, for any of a number of reasons. Anyone who has ever smeared frosting on a baked good has made a Wreck at one time or another, so I'm not here to vilify decorators: Cake Wrecks is just about finding the funny in unexpected, sugar-filled places.

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